during those 3 years, did you continue learning mostly at work? Or outside? (ie programming languages, systems design, etc.)? Or was it basically "I never brought work to home."?
I mostly stayed focused on work... that's why I stopped working on http://ihackernews.com and other side projects.
I worked probably 60 to 80 hours a week -- because I wanted to, not because I was forced. Managers actually asked me to work less.
I learned at lot at Amazon (across retail and AWS) so I didn't feel the need to keep up the level of studying I did prior to working at Amazon. Reading code reviews and watching email lists is a great way to learn and Amazon has really good internal emailing lists.
